The Nagle Journal

January 08, 1989|By KEITH F. MCLOUGHLAND

How is this for the plot outline of a lost novel by the likes of, say, James Fenimore Cooper?

Jacob Nagle is born in 1752 to a Philadelphia tavern-keeper. In 1777, at the age of 15, he and his father join George Washington's army - just in time to experience the winter at Valley Forge - and actually meet the general at the battle of Brandywine. But young Jacob is really interested in a life at sea so, two years later, he enlists in the fledgling Continental Navy. In 1781, after a brief stint as a privateer, he is captured by the British and spends the next 21 years serving as a good English seaman. Before retiring from the Royal Navy, Nagle sails under Admiral Horatio Nelson - another casual acquaintance - during the Mediterranean campaign against Napoleon. Not incidentally, he also sails with the First Fleet that settled Australia's fatal shore.

From 1802 to 1822, Nagle, an experienced mariner and now a merchant seaman, serves under a series of tyrranical, incompetent captains, several of whom work for the British East India Company. In the course of this phase of his career, he manages to make it both China and India - exotic experiences to say the least. When he finally retires, he returns at last to the country of his birth and spends the remaining 16 years of his life as far from the sea as he can get in the early days of the Republic, eventually landing in Ohio. He dies penniless in Canton at the age of 80.

These are the broad themes of the story but there are also some rich details: a wife, married in London in 1795, and some unspecified number of children, all wiped out in the Lisbon epidemic of 1802; a couple of attempted desertions; battles involving hand-to-hand combat and close calls with cannon-balls; shipboard fires, serious injuries and near-fatal exposure to the elements - all of the stuff one would expect to find in an early 19th-century potboiler. Natty Bumpo Goes to Sea.

Of course, Jacob Nagle was not a fictional character, no matter how implausible his adventures may seem. Not only did he exist, he recorded is life in a diary which he kept from 1775 to 1841.

In the summer of 1982, John C. Dann, director of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan (where he also teaches history), spotted an offer for "a book-length journal" in an autograph dealer's auction catalog. After making the appropriate inquiries, Dann submitted a bid and won the manuscript. He then spent the next several years authenticating this extraordinary find, a work he describes now in its first public appearances as "not only of great historical importance but of literary ability, even brilliance."

On the book's dust jacket is a photograph of Dann looking like the proverbial cat with feathers on its lips.

Small wonder. "The Nagal Journal" is everything Dann claims it to be. Nagle is so matter-of-fact about describing his adventures, the reader doubts he is merely in the presence of a great yarn-spinner, although this is, by any definition, a great yarn. For this edition, Dann has edited the text (lightly), added introductory essays to each phase of Nagle's life, and even arranged for the inclusion of some beautiful period prints in full color.

The whole package is not only attractive; it is a remarkable read about a remarkable individual - easily superior in plot, characterization and style to anything Fenimore Cooper ever wrote.